We're all familiar with the red-jersey-in-the-crowd phenomenon, that once you start noticing something, the same thing seems to be everywhere. But this week I've had different things coalesce to the point where I'm thinking something entirely new. The fact that it links up with all sorts of things I've thought about for a while makes me think it might even be true (and explains all the links back to earlier posts!).
First, Dorothy L. Sayers The Mind of the Maker:
the fact of universal experience [is that] the work of art has real existence apart from its translation into material form. Without the thought, though the material parts already exist, the form does not and cannot.
I know this one from my own experience, as I was thinking about in Bodies crying out. The nameless new novel does exist as a whole in my head. Sometimes, as the blank-page Chapter One moment approaches, I'm overwhelmed with indignation that I actually have to write the thing down, like a millionaire suddenly expected to walk from the hotel in town to the private jet at the airfield. The novel exists already, after all, so it's very tiresome that the mere process of transmission from my mind to the minds of others involves anything as pedestrian as choosing every one of 600,000 small black marks to put on the page. Similarly, Virginia Woolf described writing a novel as like entering a darkened room with only a torch: everything's there in the room already, you just have to illuminate it.
Then John Gardner in The Art of Fiction (my italics):
It's by the whole process of first planning the fiction and then writing it, elaborate characters and details of setting, finding the style that seems appropriate to the feeling, discovering unanticipated requirements of the plot - that the writer finds out and communicates the story's significance, intuited at the start.
Then, an aspiring writer acquaintance has suddenly been seized with a complete idea for something completely new. She's spent years on a couple of earlier books in a different genre, examining the market and writing and getting lots agents' feedback and re-writing and still being rejected. The new idea is daunting and exciting in equal measure, but now she's read an agent saying that the kind of thing she's longing to tackle has no market any more. Of course it's hugely disheartening to be told it's a given that your new novel won't sell. But all the other writers who chipped in felt much as I did (and said): that anything that demands so insistently to be written is the thing you should be writing, because you'll write it better than you would anything else. (This seems to me a classic case where market awareness is absolutely inimical to creativity, as I was discussing in The market for ropes)
Another aspiring writer acquaintance has a historical story banging around in her head for the first time but, having started to dig, is hugely daunted by the avalanche of scholarly information that's been poured over her by helpful academics. I found myself describing how, rather than reading every newspaper cutting and scholarly paper I'm offered or can lay my hands on, I have a big magazine file on my desk (and the electronic equivalent in my Bookmarks) into which I toss, unread, anything that looks as if it might be useful. And I found myself saying (though I hadn't know I'd say it,) 'Then I trust the book itself to tell me what it needs.'
And that's the point at which everything started to coalesce in my mind. Remember Umberto Eco discussing how the first 100 pages of The Name of the Rose create the reader the book needs, as I was exploring in Any spiders interested? Could it be that one fruitful analogy for the mystery of how stories are written is to think that the book makes the writer it needs? I thought writers were being pretentious in talking of characters taking over, till it happened to me. Could it be that the book as a whole takes over? If in some sense it exists in our thought/intuition independently of the material facts we gather, or the form we sort them out into? Your new story turns out to need telling from several points of view. You're going to have to set to and learn to handle a third-person omniscient narrative and shifting points of view. If the plot takes an unexpected turn, you might have work out how to find some information you didn't know you'd need. And as you read/surf/listen, you stumble across something else which the novel in your mind (as opposed to the shitty first draft mess on the page) tells you quite clearly it needs. Or, even more interestinglly, that it wants this new, un-looked-for thing and, given it, that mess on the page might become something really rather different from what it is now.
"Listen to your work, it's telling you what it needs." I suspect it's one of those irritatingly touchy-feely ideas that annoy you in a how-to-write (or act, or sculpt) book, when you were looking for a clear guide for how to create suspense, or become a character, or fire a pot that won't crack. At this stage it's not helpful to be told (as apparently Louis Armstrong did when asked what Jazz is) that if you have to ask what it means, you can't understand it. But if part of the art of becoming and surviving as a writer is to get to know your writerly self, then maybe a core part of that self is best thought about as Other: the independent entity that is the novel. Like a parent slowly and painfully learning the different ways a new baby cries, and what to do about each, maybe learning to write is partly about learning to fine-tune not only our writing, but our hearing.
